Can women hunt? Yes. Did women contribute much to human evolution through endurance hunting? Probably not

Bibliographic Data

ID2260187
AuthorsMélanie Martins (0000-0003-0368-2791, University of Washington), Alejandra Núñez‐de La Mora (0000-0002-1609-0771, Universidad Veracruzana), Alejandra Nuñez De La Mora (Universidad Veracruzana), Claudia Valeggia (0000-0003-3589-6890, Yale University), A J Veile (0000-0002-7969-9568, Purdue University West Lafayette), Amanda Veile (Purdue University)
Year2024
Volume126
Issue2
Pages365-369
Publication date2024-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.13970
OpenAlexW4392876236
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited48

A recent article by Ocobock and Lacy (Ocobock & Lacy, 2023) argues that human females are "just as, if not more, capable as males at performing arduous physical tasks" and therefore likely to have "meaningfully engaged in hunting during our evolutionary past."This is a direct challenge to the (generally accepted) canon that gendered subsistence activities are a key feature of the human ecological niche, with men typically contributing more to subsistence via endurance hunting and women through plant and small-prey foraging and other activities more compatible with women's reproductive roles and energetic trade-offs.In support of their argument, Ocobock and Lacy provide a comprehensive and novel review of the aspects of women's skeletal, muscular, and hormonal biology that may confer greater cardiometabolic protection and even enhanced athletic endurance and recovery capabilities relative to men.We agree with the authors that women have been woefully underrepresented in exercise physiology studies, and we hope that their review motivates further research into previously unexamined variation in women's physiological and athletic abilities.However, we strongly disagree with a central premise that appears to motivate this scholarship: that the idea of evolved gendered subsistence activities derives largely from incorrect assumptions extrapolated from patriarchal norms today and/or rationalizations of "implicit male superiority" based solely on anatomical gender differences.Such claims are belied by extensive ethnographic and human behavioral ecology research across multiple extant foraging societies.These studies document the near universality of gendered divisions of labor, with women's large-scale participation in hunting occurring only in specific societies (i.e., the Agta) or contexts (i.e., small-game hunting) (Bird, 1999;Hoffman, Farquharson, & Venkataraman, 2023).We further argue that the review and reconstruction of women's evolved physiological capabilities is overly reliant on, and may misapply, data from Western industrialized populations.We also caution that the authors' methodological approach does not follow the typical structure of a scientific study.Ocobock and Lacy do not state any falsifiable hypotheses or predictions to answer a specific research question, nor do they demonstrate how the physiological evidence presented changes predictions about the impact of human hunting behaviors on biological fitness (survival and reproduction).Rather, the paper is focused on underscoring the reasons why the original interpretations of male-biased hunting are "wrong" (not incomplete), while attempting to demonstrate how flawed the patriarchal view is.It is further rooted in assumptions that hunting is a superior, more-desirable activity, even explicitly stating that women are "relegated to mothering and gathering."In doing so, the authors conflate arguments belonging to different and not always compatible or comparable planes: the moral, ideological, and scientific.While Westernized individualistic perspectives may position mothering and women's domestic labor as relatively less-skilled or important activities compared to other (often male) economic contributions, this view is not shared by most contemporary scholars of foraging societies, nor by many women in foraging societies themselves.Fundamentally, we agree that gender biases in our field should be challenged, but this should not be confounded by a reluctance to accept that underlying evolutionary explanations may differ from what the "antipatriarchal" position may posit

Sociology · Demography · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · History · Human-Animal Interaction Studies

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